Hang onto your debit cards and wallets, kids! Parking in Midtown Atlanta and elsewhere in the city of Atlanta is about to get a whole lot more expensive!

Officals in the City of Atlanta are counting on a new privatized parking operation to raise some much needed revenue for the cash-strapped city. And that those people that get parking tickets, will think twice and have more ways to pay for that parking in the first place.

Duncan Solutions, Inc, a Milwaukee-based company, will take over the on-street parking operations in the commerical districts of Atlanta (including Parking In Midtown Atlanta) in November as part of a 7 year contract approved by the City Council.

The arrangement calls for the city to get a guaranteed $5.5 million in revenue, which is much better than the current $2.1 the city collected in the last TWO YEARS for parking tickets!  Duncan Solutions gets to keep anything over the $5.5.

So how will they do this? By raising the number of metered parking spaces from 900 to 2,500! Almost 3 times what it currently is. And Parking in Midtown Atlanta will certainly feel it. There are numerous streets where parking meters once existed that will probably soon have a pay station similar to the one pictured here.

But along with the new metered parking, Duncan is suppose to be cracking down on the number of unpaid tickets (some 150,000) which could lead to another $7 million in revenue.

Joe Basista, commissioner of the city's Department of Public Works said, "Where we don't have meteredparking now, people can park for free all day." This hurts local businesses since parking spaces close to their establishment do not turnover.

Multi-space meters, like the one pictured, will accept dollars, along with debit and credit cards.

Duncan currently provides the same service in some 2,000 jurisdictions, including Las Vegas and Pittsburgh.

Personally, I've used the same type of device in Miami Beach, and found it to be great in the sense of taking my American Express card to pay for parking, rather than trying to find enough quarters to stuf a meter.

It will be interesting to when and where these multi-space meters begin to appear and how Parking in Midtown Atlanta will change....there are many streets where there use to be meters, and now there are non at all, or the simple 2-hour parking signs, but no parking enforcement people to patrol.

Better keep that debit or credit card hand come holiday shopping time!